


The Nine of Swords

by Colms



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Depression, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 18:04:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3420374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colms/pseuds/Colms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke tries to pick up all that remains in the ashes of their life, but it turns out that there's nothing left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nine of Swords

**Author's Note:**

> Major spoilers for DA2; specifically, the quest All That Remains.

Your voice is one used to laughter, ecstatic verbal punctuation to an elaborate anecdote, a merry mingling of wordless syllables clashing together, staccato. You find exhilaration in everything, and your words lilt across a tongue that can crack clever comments like a whip. 

Now, there is silence. 

It hangs in the air over your head, and you suffocate in it, breath squeezed from frail, failing lungs. Stoic. Static. You hang in a space where nothing changes, time and place teetering on the edge of collapse for eternity.

You failed. You failed. You failed. 

Thoughts collide but none of them stick, sliding down your spine, or maybe it’s the blood, maybe it’s finally the end to a twisted tale. But no. It’s just the empty chill of loss. Again.

There are no quips. No languor, just listless moments dragging on, a nightmare that won't end, a pieced-together terror―no, _mother_ ―still slumped as cold dead weight in your arms.

Your head hangs. Your shoulders bow under a weight you’ve carried for years but always ignored; danced anyway, because life was a dance and you were the wind howling across the ocean. You shake with the effort of holding yourself together. After all that had happened, now this. Now the collapse. Now the knowledge that all you had worked for amounted to nothing.

There is no laughter for a long time, after that. You cannot find any within yourself―you consider trying, but the thought rings hollow and skitters off into deeper waters, waters that drown you when you try to tread them. You’d prided yourself in keeping your head above it all, but sometimes the undertow is too strong and too cold and too **_MUCH_** ―

You shut your eyes and when you open them nothing has changed. The city is still falling apart. Your mother, father, sister... still dead. Your brother still doomed to a life sentence, each breath bringing him closer to the siren's call, Calling him to the depths of the shadows. Your fault. Always your fault. He'd been right in his bitterness all those years, and you laughed it off because that was all you knew how to do.

Always your fault.

Grief is an unpleasant bedfellow, but one you’ve begun to welcome back with an almost companionable grace. It's barely a cycle anymore. The scorch of bitter liquid sears away the guilt until morning, and then you bury yourself in frivolities or the frustrations of others so you don’t have to think. Think. _It's your fault. All of this is your fault._  

 

this time, the accusations won't stop. they ring in halls now silent, in the echo of footfall where your mother's laughter used to tread―

 

The manor is too empty. You can't stand how the quiet SCREAMS at you. You can't stand how it echoes, can't stand how the rooms are too big and too empty. Your only promise to yourself was "I will never be caged" and here you are, caged in the life you built for yourself, no, built for someone else, built for a legacy you never quite fit into.

Caged. By vying for freedom. Whose freedom? Not your own, but maybe it doesn't matter anymore. Maybe it never mattered. They're all gone now, wrenched from your fingers. You bled for this, but it was their lives that were lost. Your mother. Your mother, quiet and stoic and _I'm so proud of you_ , but no, the words clashed cacophonous with sharper, jarring tones― _this is your fault. If you had been here, Bethany wouldn't be dead._

Your fault. Always your fault. You wish it had been you instead. 

 

Time passes listlessly. The house is still empty. Your mother's effects untouched, gathering dust. The glass bottles piling up. More people die. Fires flare up and flicker out. The Arishok falls and almost drags you down with him, but apparently you can't even die right. Time passes. The sun continues to rise, and seagulls continue to cry, and waves continue to lap at the beach. Wounds heal even though they still sting as much as the day you got them. You spread numbing salve on all that ails you and stop feeling. Time. The manor empty. No more laughter. The sun. The gulls. The sea. 

Champion, they murmur. I never asked for this, you try to say, but words don't fit in your mouth the way they used to, and by the time you’ve chewed them up enough it makes more sense to swallow them than to spit them out. 

You tread water and try to forget how to swim.

It's still silent, but the sun rises. The gulls call to you. The sea doesn't look so tumultuous and foreboding with dawn breaking open and leaking colours across the horizon. Your family is still dead and nothing will ever change that. Carver has stopped writing. One day he will be dead, too, in the knowledge that you put him there. 

The wounds still sting, but only when you ghost fingers across angry, knitted flesh.

 

Summer sweeps in and brings shallow, tepid evenings. The sunlight doesn’t press warm kisses to your face like it used to. 

You never could do a thing halfway, could you? All or nothing. Why lose something when you could lose everything? To anyone else, it might have been fatal, but death, it seems, has remembered everyone except for you. You wish it were the opposite way around. It isn’t.

The sun rises. Gulls call. The waves whisper against the shore. _Champion,_ they say. I didn't do it for you, you want to say, but you don’t. And still the sun rises.

It was always sunny somewhere, and time is always moving. It does not pass you by. No, you feel the lull of it all, the sway and strain. You feel the weather fluctuate—not according to any whim of your own—and _you are only human, after all_ , and maybe, if you make it into the histories, they will make you stand tall and proud, not crippled and broken on the floor of your estate. An estate you never wanted, in the name has been holding you captive ever since you can remember. A name, a life, that you never asked for. Maybe they’ll write you with eyes that burned like the sun over a dusky horizon, like all the fires you couldn’t put out. Instead, your eyes are vacant, the way Bethany’s had been, the way your mother’s were. And still, time moves. You pick up the pieces and they slice your fingers. _I’m alive_ , the red beads of blood scream at you. _You’re alive. Live._ In the morning, the sun will rise. It always does.


End file.
